


All In Your Head

by Duck_Life



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Hallucinations, Me? Sad About Richie Tozier?, Medical Conditions, Memory Loss, it's more likely than you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 18:24:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12563448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Richie doesn't remember Eddie, but sometimes he talks to him.





	All In Your Head

Rich “Records” Tozier queues up another track and leans back in his chair, fiddling absently with the microphone wire. He was fortunate enough to go right back to deejaying after… after whatever it was he did last year. 

It’s all a fog, and on the rare occasion someone actually asks him he just says he was on a bender. Pills, booze, weed. He adds another drug every time he gets asked, because that’s so much easier. 

Truth is, he doesn’t remember what he did last year for the week-or-so he was MIA. But he has a feeling that whatever he was doing, he was sober as a priest. 

Richie grabs a 12-inch single and gets ready to slide it onto the turntable when he hears a voice behind him. “Vinyl gives you cancer.”

He drops the record and whirls around, wondering who the hell got into his studio without him knowing. But when he sees the man behind him, his heart just about stops. He’s skinny and pale, wiltingly handsome with big worried eyes. “What?” Richie says.

“Vinyl,” the man repeats. “That stuff’ll give you cancer. Bet your fur.” 

And then the man just disappears, vanishes like a mirage or like a television program fuzzing out into digital snow.

* * *

 

That night, after Richie’s finished his broadcast and is trying not to think about whatever the hell happened back there, he takes two melatonin and flops back on his bed. With his contacts out, everything looks soft and abstract, like he’s stepped inside a Salvador Dali painting. 

Just before his eyes drift shut, he thinks he can make out the outline of a man standing in front of his window. It doesn’t worry him, though.

Actually, Richie feels like he knows him.

* * *

 

In the morning, Richie gargles with Listerine and spits it into the sink, and when he straightens up, there’s the man again, watching him in the mirror. “Mouthwash gives you cancer,” the man says solemnly. 

“Cancer or halitosis, it’s a toss-up,” Richie says, turning to look at the man. It occurs to him that he should be more concerned about whatever’s going on, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t care. So what if he’s being haunted? So what if he’s going crazy? At least it’s a change. “What’s your name?” he asks the man.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t,” Richie says, scowling as he reaches for the floss. He threads it between his front teeth and then moves back, inching toward the molars. “What’s your name?” 

“It’s Eds.”

Richie smiles but also kind of feels like he just got shot in the stomach. He yanks the floss out of his mouth and drops it in the wastebin. “No, it’s not.” He doesn’t know how he knows that, he just knows, the same way he knew that Orson Welles was going to die the day before it happened. He just woke up that day and thought, very calmly,  _ There he goes _ . And there he went. 

The man whose name isn’t Eds leaves the same way he left the day before.

* * *

 

Richie doesn’t tell anyone about this hallucination or ghost or whatever it is. For one thing, people are already a little wary about him ever since the bender-that-wasn’t-a-bender. And, to be honest, the guy is decent company. 

“Let’s see, ham cold cuts and Kraft singles,” Richie mumbles, glancing at the list he has written on the back of a McDonald’s receipt. 

“Kraft singles give you cancer,” his tagalong says automatically.

“Of course they do,” Richie says, grabbing a package of cheese slices and dropping it into the cart. “Is there anything that doesn’t cause cancer, man?”

“Wheatgrass,” he reels off. “Lemon juice. Cayenne pepper.” He switches tracks abruptly. “Do you remember the dam?”

“The what?” 

“We built a dam,” the man says. “A real one, that thing was no baby dam. It was a real dam and we flooded out the Barrens. Do you remember?”

But Richie doesn’t remember almost any of his childhood, a condition he’s always chalked up to alcohol abuse. “No,” he says. But there is something else he remembers, something that just speared into his head just now like a bolt of lightning. “Your name is Eddie.”

“That’s wight, wabbit.”

* * *

 

That night, Richie tosses and turns in bed before jerking awake from a nightmare of sewer water and spider silk. He coughs, feeling like he’s drowning and he needs to get all these memories out or he’ll choke on them. “We left you,” he gasps, but the horrible realization is already fading, shrinking into the distance like the hero in a Western riding over the horizon. “We left you, oh God, we left you there in the dark.”

His bedroom is quiet. And then he hears Eddie say, “That’s wight, wabbit.”

* * *

 

Richie’s smoking a cigarette on his balcony one evening when Eddie appears beside him, decked out in a soldier’s uniform. “Private Eddie Kaspbrak reporting for duty,” Eddie announces, snapping a salute. “I’m here to serve.”

“You weren’t a soldier,” Richie says. He doesn’t know how he knows that, but he knows that. 

“Wasn’t I?” Eddie says. “After all, you and I served in a war together. And you survived.” 

“I’m sorry.”

Eddie shrugs as if to say,  _ Eh, I’m over it _ . And then he points to the cigarette in Richie’s hand. “You know that shit gives you cancer, right?”

* * *

 

Another day, another headache. Richie’s back in the studio rambling on in one of his voices— Kinky Briefcase, but then he’s not even sure. Sometimes he just sort of lets them happen, lets his mouth run without really steering it anywhere. 

When he notices the blood on his hand, he switches off the mike and puts on a track before rushing to the bathroom. Two gashes had suddenly appeared on his hands, blood drenching his palms and running down his fingers. Richie clambers for the faucet, hurrying to stick his hands under the cold water. 

When he looks up, Eddie’s there watching him. “Remember?” he says, holding up his own hands to show the cuts across his own palms. And in that moment, Richie does remember. He remembers standing in the Barrens with his hands bleeding like they are now, looking up at Bev, Stan, Bill, Mike, Ben and Eddie. He remembers the oath they made, and he remembers with sudden clarity  _ exactly _ where he went last year. What he did. Who he lost. 

And then the burst of memory disappears along with Eddie, and Richie’s hands are suddenly smooth and spotless. But his nose is bleeding.

* * *

 

Richie wakes up the next morning with a splitting migraine, and he’s not really surprised to see Eddie standing by the window. “Good morning, Sunshine,” Richie says, mouth dry, tongue heavy. 

“You should just stay in bed,” Eddie says.

“I tell myself that every damn day.” Richie stands up and begins dressing for work. 

Eddie sticks close by him as he grabs a banana for breakfast and heads down to his car. “Jolly good, then, young Edward, you’ll be escorting me all day then, hmm?” he says, but his headache is making the Voice far less quality than normal. Eddie doesn’t speak, he just glides into the passenger seat and remains silent while Richie drives to the studio. 

“I remembered everything last night,” Richie says quietly when he gets to a stoplight. “I don’t remember  _ what _ I remembered, but I remember that it wasn’t pretty.” 

“I can’t tell you anything,” Eddie says. “In fact, I hope you never remember. That’s what Stanley Uris did, he remembered  _ everything _ , and look at what happened to him.”

Richie stares straight ahead, his heart puttering weakly like an old engine. The light turns green. He hits the gas. “Who the fuck is Stanley Uris,” he mumbles under his breath. He turns on the radio and “A Well-Respected Man” by the Kinks is playing.

It’s still playing when he gets to the studio parking deck. It’s still playing the second before he cuts the engine, and when he opens the car door and immediately collapses against the concrete ground, he thinks he can still hear the Kinks in his head.

* * *

 

Richie wakes up in a white bed in a white room with a white-uniformed nurse standing beside him. “Mm? Hrm?” he says intelligently.

The nurse looks surprised and then smoothes away that emotion to be more comforting. “Hello, Mr. Tozier. How are you feeling?”

_ Like a mummy _ . That’s what he thinks he feels like, like a mummy, desiccated and heavy and dry. “Fine,” he manages. “What… what happened? Did I black out?”

“The doctor will be able to give you more information,” the nurse tells him. “You just sit tight and I’ll get him for you, alright?”

Richie tries to nod but his head’s too heavy.

* * *

 

The doctor’s voice tunes in and out like bad reception. Richie picks up the important words— surgery, brain, malignant, nosebleeds, hallucinations, headaches. Tumor, that’s an important word. It clings on the tip of his tongue like syrup. Tumor.

Alone in a cold hospital room, Richie Tozier says quietly, “I’m scared.” 

“I’m here,” Eddie says, watching from the visitor’s chair. Richie pushes himself up on his elbows and stares at the other man, who looks sad and worried and almost like he’s in pain himself. 

“No, you’re not,” Richie says, but he doesn’t even sound angry. His Voice is quiet, weak like the tea his mother used to make. “You’re not here, Eds. You’re here.” He points to his head. “You’re a big fat fucking tumor pushing down on my brain.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “I tried to tell you.”

Everything goes faster than Richie expected. Soon enough there’s a nurse shaving his head, and doctors keep pouring into his room to talk to him, medical jargon all mushing together. “I wish Bill were here,” he mumbles one time while a nurse wheels him down to the MRI machine. 

“Who’s Bill?” she says.

“I don’t remember.”

* * *

 

The night before he goes into surgery, Richie tells Eddie, “If I survive and everything goes alright, I’m going to forget you again.” It’s not a question, but Eddie nods solemnly. “Tell me about them, then. Tell me about the Losers.”

Eddie talks and talks, tells him about Stan the Man and Mike and Bevvie and Big Bill and Ben “Haystack” Hanscom, tells him about the sewers, tells him about twenty-seven years ago and one year ago and everything they did together. 

It’s like a bedtime story, even if it is a scary one, and Richie finds himself drifting off. “Hey, Eds?” he says sleepily. “If I don’t… if something goes wrong tomorrow, am I gonna see you again? I mean, you know, if I don’t make it.”

His heart thuds frantically.

But Eddie’s nowhere to be seen.

* * *

The anesthesiologist’s face swims in front of his vision. He’s already flying, soaring by on the medication they pumped into his IV. “Relax, Mr. Tozier,” the anesthesiologist says. “You’re going to sleep now, okay?”

Richie tries to nod, but his head feels too heavy. He notices another face watching him over the anesthesiologist’s shoulder, a familiar face. “Eds,” he says. 

Eddie says, “Don’t call me Eds.”


End file.
